Recipe for Iron Sulfide

5 grams Iron Filings (Fe)
5 grams Sulfur (S)
HEAT (from Bunsen Burner)

Add iron filings and sulfur together, and place in test tube. Add heat from the Bunsen burner. Simmer for several minutes. Let reaction occur in a fume hood to prevent the aroma from going around the whole school.

Here is a view of what happened as our mixture of Iron and Sulfur became Iron Sulfide:



Some questions for the Crazy 8s:

1. What were some signs that a chemical change took place? (What did you observe as the mixture in the test tube was heated?) Be descriptive!
2. Did the properties of the original components change when the new substance was formed? How? Which ones?
3. The mass of your new substance was less than the mass of the individual components that went into the reaction. However, in a chemical reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed. What explains the change in mass?
   

Chemistry Labs

Chemistry Jeopardy

Go back to "slide 2" after each question in order to see (and select from) the main game board.

Chemistry Jeopardy

Chemistry VoiceThread

This VoiceThread presentation, brought to you by the some of our Crazy 8 Scientists, describes some of the concepts they have learned about during the chemistry unit.

Bonding and Matter Standard Check tomorrow...

Things to know for the standard check tomorrow:

• Key terms, such as Matter, Element, Compound, and Mixture
• How can the components that make up compounds be separated? What about the components of mixtures?
• How many different types of substances are needed to make elements, compounds, and mixtures?
• What happens to the properties of substances when they form compounds? Do they remain the same, or are they different? What happens to the properties of substances when mixtures are formed?
• Examples of physical properties and chemical properties
• Examples of physical and chemical changes: For more practice on physical and chemical changes go to this site, where there are 20 changes you can identify as being physical or chemical.
• How can you illustrate what occurs in an ionic bond? Here is a video, if you need a refresher....

• How can you illustrate what occurs in a covalent bond? Here is another video. Feel free to view it if you're not sure how to draw covalent bonds.

Let me know if you have any questions on this stuff. As always, I hope that all of you do a great job on the standard check tomorrow. Can you believe that it is the end of the 1st Quarter already?

Human Bohr Model

Here is some video footage from last week's "Battle of Bohr" with the other 8th grade teams. It was a fun day! Sorry if each student/class is not present in the video -- You all did a great job.

Static Electricity

Below is a picture of my daughter from last fall. She briefly turned her soccer goal into a fort/tent with a blanket on top, and (as you can see) some serious static electricity was produced!

After reading the short article AND contemplating some of your own experiences with static electricity, answer the following questions in a comment on this blog post:

1. What causes "Static Electricity"?
2. What does static electricity have to do with chemistry, atoms, and an atom's structure?